Democratizing design: 3D printing and on demand design

Regina Connell at Handful of Salt writes a blog about gorgeous high end craft and design…as a fan of both craft and technology, she asked me to muse around the intersection between them.

Good design is expensive – whether it\’s an antique, a handmade statement piece by a modern craftsperson or a luxury post modern statement.

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Producing a piece of craft takes a long time to learn, a long time to make, and customers who appreciate the cost associated with all of this. The 20th century has seen the slow demise in the desire for \”something handmade\”; mass production and standardization have for the most part replaced the time and skill it takes to make things.

Part of the problem is that – frankly – many who make \”crafts\’ approach it in a slightly egocentric way; they are the artist, they make what they like, and they then try to sell it. Often through stores that sell on commission, meaning they need to put a LOT of time, effort, and sometimes money (for the raw materials) into inventory that might sit at a retailers for months before they see any cash from the sale.

Some are lucky enough to sell by prototype, where a customer can custom order elements (I was the spine blue, and the legs red) – but this requires a lot of patience (and money) on the part of the customer. But the majority are not famous enough to demand the prices necessary to justify a well known distributor agreeing to represent them.

The high end luxury brands aren\’t really all that different; although they create multiple of the same thing, only a percentage produce on demand – most come up with that season\’s designs, manufacture them, and then sell at wholesale through a retail distribution system. This creates the same inventory problem for the design company, or for the customer (price + lead time to delivery).

To (eventually!) get to my point….most things that are high \”design\” items, whether handmade by one person, or designed and made by a high end company, are out of reach of the average consumer. And are expensive to make for the people and companies that make them.

The solution that is (slowly) emerging is 3d printing.

\"\"For those of you not familiar with what it is, it\’s basically exactly what it sounds like; a graphic designed with a program that generates actual 3D information is \”printed\” using a machine that takes the virtual information and slowly, a micron thick layer at a time, builds a \”real\” version of what was in the computer before – currently in a hard plastic resin. But rapidly expanding in terms of color,  (eventually, faux) finishes, and (I believe) textures – so printing \”leather\” etc. might become a reality (with a nod to Corbusier, I\’m not sure pony hair is an option, but then again, who knows?)

The technology has been around for quite a while, actually, predominantly to create prototypes for maufacturing, but has recently started getting good enough (and fast enough) to be used for making the actual objects. And although the size of what can be printed is currently limited, and it\’s still fairly time consuming, but it\’s improving rapidly.

The genius to this is that in the future, companies (or craftspeople) won\’t have to hold inventory. Customers can order customized (personalized) furniture for much less money (no hand labor!) and much quicker than if they waited for the \”real\” thing (if they were able to own the \”original\” at all).

And the most interesting part: it will completely disintermediate the retail channel.

No longer will retailers wield the power they now do since a person can go online, look at a virtual version of the cad file (using virtual world technology? Undoubtedly!), place it in a virtual mock up of their house, pick the col0r/dimensions they want, order it directly – and get exactly what they want. Without having to pay the (huge!!) retail markup. Little waste (much more environmentally friendly!) as there\’s no more guessing each season how many to make then dump, or in fact lose out on missed sales since the inventory wasn\’t available. With a license fee going to the artist who created the original design.

It\’s already happening! For small scale objects…give it time.

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\”But it\’s not the same as handmade\” you say. Indeed – it\’s not. But for the huge swathe of people who never would have been able to own anything so high end, it will open a whole new world of access to high end design that they would have never had….plus the option to personalize, which is, as the dear readers of my blog know, one of my biggest soapboxes for how consumers will demand all things in the future (what, you thought I meant only in how they get content delivered??).

And for the craftspeople, they can still create a prototype by hand, 3D scan it, and offer it to potential customers without having to make lots of product that just sit in the retail channel. While some will reject the notion because it\’s not handmade, many will see the benefit to creating access to a wider market and a positive cash flow without extra investment – and then focus on creating new pieces without worrying about paying the rent in the meantime.

It\’s a great way to grow and in many ways, frees an artist up to spend more time creating.

And it opens up a whole new world for crowdsourcing, social opinionating and sharing sites to sprout – which can become the new transaction facilitators between customers and artists. Getting rid of the traditional retail channel in the meantime.

The only hesitation I have to this bright new world of design democracy is that – as with digital printing, video \"\"creation, and music composition (and, erm, Photoshop) – what was once the privilege and realm of the (trained) designer will be democraticized to the point where bad design will become commonplace. Currently the barrier to the truly heinous and ugly is quite high…will Uncle Bob think he\’s a designer, mixing purple legs and brown fringe? Undoubtedly.

Is the trade off worth it? Absolutely. And we will all think we\’re design geniuses.

Not just a pretty face in the crowd: The future of Visual Search

\"\"I\’m fascinated with the potential for visual search a la Google Goggles. It\’s one of the newest ways to search and at the forefront of the next generation: it allows you to search from your cell phone by snapping a picture, and returns information about the building, object, business, etc. (true augmented reality). I first used it when passing a historic building, and was curious about it. My friend pulled out his phone, snapped a picture, and voila! – information about what it was, the architect, date and style, etc. So neat that I think I actually squealed.

I\’ve since used it again, with various success. It\’s definitely still an emerging technology, but over time the database of images and capabilities will improve. Want more info on a product? Take a picture. Need info about a business? Photograph the storefront. Put simply, this thing packs some serious power, and its capabilities stretch far.

I personally think when it does improve (along with voice interactive software) it will become as indispensable to everyday life as cell phones, texting, and search engines have become.

But then I started thinking about eventual convergences, and the inevitable trajectory it will take: integration with facial recognition software and other data points.

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Facial recognition software has had a huge influx of cash and interest since 9/11 for security reasons. It\’s here, it\’s improving, and pretty soon anonymity will be completely obsolete, if it\’s not already – at least to the companies who use it to scan airport passengers, law enforcement, and others who have made it a goal.

We live in an era where an overwhelming amount of data exists on each of us, from our social networking connections and comments, to our shopping habits at the supermarket. Cell phone usage, online searches, cookies on sites visited, credit card purchases – all of these create data which builds a picture of who we are.

But currently, these are still siloed. The grocery store isn\’t matching your checkout purchases with your Pandora list and identifying friends of yours on Twitter who are most likely to share your taste, then using the data to target them with advertising.

One of these days, though, facial recognition software will be one of the links connecting the dots between who you are with other data points such as your FB profile, and your Pandora list. At that point, if someone wants to know who that cute guy sitting at the next table is all they will have to do is take his picture – and know who he is, what music he likes, his address (courtesy of whitepages.com), books he\’s bought (thanks to amazon.com), his house value (zillow.com), online subscriptions, health risks based on his grocery purchases, etc etc. Spokeo.com and a few others are baby steps towards data aggregation – crude, often incorrect, and using identifiers which are imprecise, but it is the next logical step in data mining: analysis crossing across collection points, as opposed to little ponds.

This scenario – inevitable as it is – obviously has many potential pitfalls. It\’s great for companies (I\’d advise anyone with a talent for numbers to consider a career in data modeling!), but is a mixed bag for consumers. The privacy issues are obvious, but those aside, the personalization that the market increasingly is demanding is impossible without data mining and developing good predictive capabilities. On the one hand people are uncomfortable with their data being gathered (not like this wasn\’t always happening — it\’s just more extensive now), and on the other, good data mining will ensure that people are targeted with offers and services that are interesting and relevant to them.

It\’s a teetering tightrope walk. As a business strategist / consultant, I work with clients to develop strategies to take advantage of all that is legal, effective, and (personally) always try to do so with integrity. As consumers we should be trying to influence privacy legislation, to ensure that this future is one that not only makes our lives easier, but does so safely. The challenge is that data knows no national boundaries, so what effect will legislation be able to have? I don\’t have the answer, only want to add to the discussion.

Welcome 2011 – Garbo was on to something: Trends in digital privacy

\"\"Happy 2011 to everyone! I\’ve been woefully bad at posting blog entries these last few weeks – largely due to preparation for moving across the country – which doesn\’t at all mean that I haven\’t been noticing trends and connecting dots while taping yet another box.

2010 was a dizzying year on many fronts and I think people are weary on many levels. The economy has consistently stayed slow, wave after wave of corruption has been uncovered, the \”war\” in the Middle East drags on, and domestic rhetoric increasingly has overtones of a civil war. Panic and fear mongering in the media have added a huge amount of fuel to a fire which was already there, and a natural reaction to all of this is a desire to retrench, to return to comfort. This is about as far from the optimistic forward thinking 1960s as a society can get. People are tired.

One way I think this is being reflected is a trend towards Social Networking fatigue. People left and right seem to have reached their limit of \”connecting\” and the latest cool thing to be doing is actually cutting back on connections, and being more selective. We\’ve taken to social networking with the wide eyed enthusiasm of a child, tasting, testing, and now want to reframe it to suit our own personal needs, which means only interacting with those with whom we share a real connection.

Facebook in particular suffers from being too \”mass\” and not enough personalization to meet those needs. There is – without extensive paying attention to tweaking – only one way to \”connect\”; your bff shares the same level of connection as the friend of a friend of a friend who reached out because of one comment you made.

You also kind of know something\’s jumped the shark, to use what is no doubt an antiquated phrase, when McDonald\’s has a grandmother talking about your Facebook comment and using the phrase \”l-o-l-ing\” in their radio spot. Junior is going to need a place to talk to their own friends, and Mom and Dad might want to enjoy an off color joke.

Along the same lines, the digital world is increasingly acting like an ancient Greek Hydra: as soon as you reset your FB privacy settings yet again to combat a new default they\’ve implemented, another service or problem comes to light. Twitter, for example, on 10/10/2010 agreed with the US government to archive all tweets not deleted within 23 weeks; in other words, everything you\’ve ever said – in a heated moment, in reaction, anything, will be permamently stored. For what purpose? Who knows. I can only guess it\’s in reaction to some purported anti terrorist BS, where all data is stored so that at some future time if they need some out of context statement to point to it can be dug up.

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It\’s particularly scary since in social media very few comments are made as stand alones, so taken out of context are sort of like Rorschach tests; the meaning can be twisted to any way necessary.

As a result of all these reasons (and more), I think this is the year when we\’ll see a splintering / fragmentation of social networking as a result. Smaller sites that are tailored to the needs of specific groups will spring up and people will use each to fill a different need.

I also think private (closed / high walled) groups will emerge. Along with the rise of \”privacy services\” – companies who monitor and manage your digital identity. Staying on top of monitoring and actively managing your online persona is extremely time consuming, pretty soon people will be outsourcing it – as they already do with identity protection services like LifeLock etc. If these type of services are not actively looking to move into this space, they should be.

All of this will also lead to the need for cross social networking sites apps; a \”Trillian\” type of application which will connect multiple social networking services – eliminating the value of each destination url (eg Facebook.com) since these will be a generic supplier of connectivity, while the interface will be the Trillian-type app.

This will also eliminate the barrier to exit for users of FB, which is currently the 800lb gorilla of the social networking sites in the US (not as much in other parts of the world, where Orkut and some others dominate). If it\’s invisible to you, the user, which social networking site your friends are using, then loyalty to one or the other won\’t be necessary. It will also completely dilute the value of FB. Personally if I were Mark Zuckerberg – man of the year regardless – I\’d sell off many, many shares before this inevitability happens.

So, with a nod to Greta, I predict 2011 will be the year of \”I vant to be left alone!\”

Disruptive cataclysms? The impact of rapidly changing technology

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Technology – and the \”rapid changes\” everyone is talking about – is being hailed as a disruptive force. Most recently Mark Zuckerberg used the term to describe the future business landscape, and how Facebook (or rather, erm, \”social networking\”) was at the forefront of the next generation of businesses.

But there are two levels of where \”disruption\” is happening: not only at the business level, but also at the consumer. I\’m going to stick to consumers in this discussion, snce I\’m constantly hearing about people adapting to the \”rate of change\”, or rather, the (perceived) difficulties this is bringing.

To the average person technology has brought neat things to their lives at a dizzying rate, such as the ability to chat 24 hours a day with \”friends\”, communicate instantly in a few different ways, and rendered getting lost obsolete.

It\’s brought geographically disperse people with niche interests together (You knit clothes for your pet goat?? Me too!), brought us exotic food all year long, extended our lives, and for the most part – kept us healthy. The world has become infinitely smaller.  We can walk and talk and bank and read and chat and pat our heads while rubbing our tummies and drinking our coffee to go…

But it\’s also (among other things) made us work around the clock (well, in the US anyway), and created whole new areas of interaction etiquete that is as of yet, still being defined. And don\’t get me started on online dating.

\"\"I suppose to many people it does indeed feel like it is moving too rapidly (with the resulting frankensteinish stories on the news, today it\’s \”PASTOR SAYS FACEBOOK IS THE GATEWAY TO SIN!!! – crikey), but I keep returning to my core assertion, though, which is less flamboyantly sexy than many other who are predicting all sorts of new societies and seismic level cultural shifts as a result: technology only enables and enhances what we already do. So while I don\’t subscribe to the dystopian future where our computer overlords rule us through our dependency on them, I also don\’t believe that some huge shift in basic humanity is going to happen as a result.

I see one of two potential paths. Either:

  1. The impact of perceived rapid changes in culture will create a pendulum swing back to the uber conservative, as people retreat to comfort zones; I mean a serious Luddite movement, complete with agricultural faith-based communities and prairie dresses (god help, and excuse that pun). Rejection of modern life in full flower.      …or…
  2. People will embrace technological changes as they become an increasingly invisible driver of their every day experiences, not forcing any cataclysmic reaction whatsoever. And in a generation or so, the \”fast pace\” (ubiquitous, instant connectivity) will be all they\’ve ever known – eliminating the desire to \”return to a simpler life\”

My guess is some will go one way, some others. There\’s never one recipe for all personalities. Those who crave routine, tradition, and fear change will retreat. The others will continues to embrace the double edged benefits of our brave new world.

You can\’t force people to accept new technology though, or the changes to their lives that will be associated with it, unless they want it. I\’m a true believer in you can lead the horse to water, so to speak, but you can\’t make it drink….if the technology that\’s introduced is not adopted, it will fail,  regulating the \”speed\” of change naturally. It can\’t be forced on the unwilling. People are flocking to smart phones because it speaks to a basic human need to communicate, and increasingly, instantly.

While I\’m on a roll, though, I\’m actually going to challenge the entire assumption: that change is happening \”so rapidly\”.

I think the major shifts have already emerged:

  • Social networks becoming the personal authorities (requiring brands to figure out how to communicate and relate, vs message \”to\”)
  • Ubiquitous/instant communication (which will require cross- and trans platform technologies / infrastructure)
  • Personalized information (requiring good data and effective predictive algorythms) on demand

Businesses are incrementally improving on all of these (it\’s still in infancy), and figuring out how to seamlessly integrate all these things, how to gather, track and correlate data properly to best \”serve\” the customer (maximize profit), but I don\’t believe there will be any great \”leaps\” above and beyond these; no major paradigm shifts that leave these concepts in the dust…and that\’s because these are speaking to – at a DNA level – the most basic human needs: affiliation with a group <love>, and the powerful human ego.

So disruptive? For the business forced to figure out how to compete, and survive in an era of decreasing product life cycles, definitely.  

But to the consumer, who is ultimately holding the reigns, it only currently feels so because it\’s still all so disjointed – and visible – and confusing. As it all starts to work better and becomes more invisible and seamless, not so much. So the future money will be earned by the companies that can help  make the experience as close to \”breathing\” as possible – ideally consumers won\’t even notice it\’s there,  they\’ll just have the experience they want.

So that great human revolution won\’t be necessary; we\’ll all be too busy catering to our egos: chatting, opining,  connecting, and – *sigh* – blogging.

Twitter me smart(er): Intelligence and social networking

\"\"I\’ve seen a whole spate of articles like this one in the recent few months that frankly, raise my hackles (what is a hackle, actually?)

The reason is the premise is all wrong.

They are claiming that the technology – in this case, Twitter – can actually make you smarter, based on a semester long study of student who use / don\’t use Twitter. The ones who did reportedly had higher GPAs.

Never mind that a GPA is hardly a measure of intelligence (the correlated premise of the article), but more importantly \”Twitter\” is only the technology that enables something that humans already do (and always have): communicate.

If these students are already the type who share and partake in a higher amount of information exchange, then the technology is just the medium. You can\’t attribute increased GPAs to the technology, rather to the type of person who uses it.

And for that matter, they should have – if they wanted to prove that there is a correlation between social networking and increased grades – included Facebook and other programs.

Methodology of the study aside, it\’s an example of the kind of channeled thinking that is so limiting.

Where are you, Dick Tracy? The future form of mobile gadgets

\"\"It\’s no secret I\’ve always wanted a watch phone. Not the least reason being, I\’m constantly losing the \”phone\” (information aggregation device, or \”IAD\” as I like to call it, when in a particularly geeky mood. Not, of course, to confuse with Dulles airport\’s code) that I do I have – attempts at making it easier to find with bright covers and rhinestones nonetheless.

It makes such sense, really, that this precious device which increasingly is our connection to the world, holds our personal data, pictures (memories), entertainment, emails, etc etc should somehow be attached. When this precious device is our payment medium as well (which is coming), it\’s just common sense that we won\’t want to misplace it, or have it easily stolen while it lies on the restaurant table.

Siemens always seems to be on the cutting edge of product design…I watched with fascination back in 2003 when they introduced the \”Xelibri\” line of mobile phones when I was living in London, which they launched through Selfridges (a fashion store, not a \”phone\” store – interesting and intentional category statement there). Personal communication jewelry, necklaces, mostly, from what I saw; not particularly attractive, and definitely too early for the technology to really support the concept; it flopped horribly, but they were on to something. Just, way too early.

So why haven\’t these really taken off yet? Well – cost is one factor. Interface, another.  Battery life – all these things. But with ear pieces, talking is solved; with increasing miniaturization, and private transactions going mobile, it\’s inevitable.

Perhaps, in line with a phone not being a \”phone\” anymore but a new sort of device, we should come up with a new category of what this will be: not a watch, or a bracelet, or even a phone; I\’ll try to come up with some brand spanking new term….in the interim, I\’ll just keep thinking of it as a watch phone. And I want one.

Disintermediating the entertainment industry

I\’ve been thinking a lot about \”entertainment content\”, people\’s increasing demands for what they want / when they want it, and the proliferating host of gadgets that are on the market. I mean, we have a \”phone\”, a \”tv\”, and \”ipad\”, etc etc. There have been fits and starts towards true convergence for years now…I wasn\’t sure if it was going to be the computer people being the convergence drivers (the Origami micro PC was an attempt a few years ago), or the phone people, or the television people – as it turns out, the \”phones\” are where convergence has come from.

….At any rate, and despite all the convergence gadgets, entertainment content is still being delivered in a really channeled manner. I pay for tv, for my Internet enabled phone  (where I can stream tv shows), for Internet access and then Netflix for their streaming entertainment, and for the most part these four (TV, phone, Internet, Netflix) are four access point for the same content. This is obviously not efficient.

I\’m waiting for the day when I pay for one access point – and I think it will be through the phone. As soon as what we now call a \”phone\” is able to act as the funnel point for my entertainment needs and then send the information to the output device which is set up to interact with that data, the need for all these others will vanish. So – I will choose what I want to watch (when I want to watch it), tell the phone to stream it and output to the large screen on my wall. Or I will tell it to connect to a keyboard, and an external screen then work on a Word document.

I understand that this all has challenges: besides the obvious current bandwidth issues of the \”phone\” device (which can be solved), there\’s the challenges that the entertainment content people (20th Century Fox, etc) face in their current agreements with the existing/legacy distribution channels. The entire industry will be turned upside down, and every tier of the chain is madly scrambling to figure out how to manage what\’s happening. But it will happen because the people who have the most to gain – the phone companies – will push for it and have the fledgling support of consumers who are flocking to smart phones to back up their push.

I\’ll talk about how cloud storage is also going to enable these developments in another post….as well as how consumer demand for instant gratification is one of the biggest drivers behind all of this.

And also the ramification for brands and advertising. Which is huge.

Update 1/8/2011: At CES, Motorola unveiled the Atrix Superphone, which has docking capabilities that allow you to use it with a mouse and a keyboard as if it were a normal computer (with 4G capabilities and a dual-core Tegra 2 processor – yee haw!). Not only can they now run Word, Excel, etc AND communicate AND surf the internet AND stream entertainment etc etc – the only thing keeping this from happening was interface and processing power. With cloud storage local memory won\’t be needed (you stream it from your virtual memory on demand). Watch out laptop manufacturers – this is going to make you as obsolete as you did the traditional computer towers.

Blurring the line (channeling Neo): Virtual relationships

This is fascinating: www.psfk.com/2010/09/japanese-men-enjoying-their-holidays-with-virtual-girlfriends.html

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Yes, you read that correctly: There\’s a hotel in Japan catering to men and not real women.

\”Japan’s resort town of Atami held an interesting yet unusual promotional campaign last month to draw in tourists-customized packages for Japanese men who come with their virtual girlfriends.

These girlfriends are videogame characters from the hit dating-simulation game LovePlus+ and cater to men who are lonely and miss having a girl by their side. Users carry their girlfriends in a game device that recreates the actual experience of a romance and relationship.\”

Increasingly people seem to be blurring the line between the virtual and \”real\”. My pet theory on this one is that people don\’t have the patience – or bandwidth – to put effort into developing real relationships (nasty, time consuming, and impossible to control things that they are). How much more perfect than having a girlfriend (or boyfriend, or self created alien!) who does whatever you want?

And how will this trend impact on the real world? Are people going to keep retreating into their own, self created (and totally controlled) worlds at the expense of \”real\”? It reminds me of Solaris, that planet created by Asimov where contact between humans is distasteful and (life like – we\’re getting there) robots serve every whim.

…and if you\’re curious, Asimov\’s Robot/Foundation Series are well worth reading – particularly, in my opinion, The Caves of Steel  and The Naked Sun.

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